Hiding and finding: The relationship between visual concealment and visual search

Abstract

Souther, 1985). The second stimulus set, the affective-face set, which included three different affective faces, has been 1793© As an initial step toward developing a theory of visual concealment, we assessed whether people would use factors known to influence visual search difficulty when the degree of concealment of objects among distractors was varied. In Experiment 1, participants arranged search objects (shapes, emotional faces, and graphemes) to create displays in which the targets were in plain sight but were either easy or hard to find. Analyses of easy and hard displays created during Experiment 1 revealed that the participants reliably used factors known to influence search difficulty (e.g., eccentricity, target-distractor similarity, presence/absence of a feature) to vary the difficulty of search across displays. In Experiment 2, a new participant group searched for the targets in the displays created by the participants in Experiment 1. Results indicated that search was more difficult in the hard than in the easy condition. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants used presence versus absence of a feature to vary search difficulty with several novel stimulus sets. Taken together, the results reveal a close link between the factors that govern concealment and the factors known to influence search difficulty, suggesting that a visual search theory can be extended to form the basis of a theory of visual concealment.

Hide and seek: The theory of mind of visual concealment and search

“…The placing of easy targets in corner positions of the display and hard targets more centrally converges with the notion that edges are a salient feature that supports pop-out in a variety of domains (e.g., texture, motion, disparity), whereas a target is well camouflaged when surrounded by like items. Our finding that participants have accurate and natural intuitions of these facts dovetails with Smilek et al (2009).…”

“…If changes in the visual environment and/or a participant's conceptualization of the hider or finder (friend or foe) has the same impact on search and concealment behaviour, then the evidence will be that the two behaviours reflect the same underlying processes (Smilek et al 2009). A significant change in search and concealment behaviour would suggest a very different conclusion.…”

Arranging Objects in Space: Measuring Task‐Relevant Organizational Behaviors During Goal Pursuit

“…Very little work has explored the former aspect, though what has been done suggests that the factors that facilitate search dovetail with the factors that facilitate action. For example, Smilek, Weinheimer, Kwan, Reynolds, and Kingstone (2009) have shown that participants asked to arrange search items to make search easy tend to centralize targets, group similar items, and arrange distractors in regular arrays. Similarly, Anderson, Foulsham, Nasiopoulos, Chapman, and Kingstone (2014) report that individuals hiding an item for a friend (in contrast to hiding an item adversarially) tended to select a nearby, easy-to-reach location.…”

Not All Locations Are Created Equal: Exploring How Adults Hide and Search for Objects

“…Studies of human adult search behaviors have generally focused on visual search for a target object among distractors in two-dimensional displays of artificial and natural scenes (e.g., [4]–[5]), or the concealment of objects within a visual display [6]. One recent study [7] investigated strategies used by people to search for a single object in a complex three-dimensional virtual maze.…”